Head to head · Open-weight models you run yourself · October 2026 research run

LFM3-1.7B vs WeVisOne-VL-4B

LFM3-1.7B and WeVisOne-VL-4B score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 61 (C) and 61 (C). WeVisOne-VL-4B leads on risk. Both do open-weight models you run yourself.

Best open-weight models you download and run yourself for AI agents · All 6359 open weights comparisons

Which one, for what

LFM3-1.7B C

Best for Agents on a laptop, phone or small server that need tool calling and a long context from a model under 2 GB at 4 bits

Ahead on

  • Reach, 85 against 70
  • Agent interface, 100 against 70
  • Documentation and upkeep, 67 against 48

Watch for

vLLM and SGLang have no released support, though the card lists both

WeVisOne-VL-4B C

Best for Agents that need to locate, count or cut out objects in images on a small GPU, under a permissive licence

Ahead on

  • Risk, 55 against 40

Watch for

The pixel decoder ships as a pickle file

Why the edge

Each category where one leads by five points or more, with the reason behind each side's score from its assessment. The numbers are in the table below; this is what they stand for.

Agent interface LFM3-1.7B +30

LFM3-1.7B 100

Chat template 20, chat_template.jinja in the repository (12,129 characters), with roles, tools, deferred tools, tool results and the thinking switch. Tool-calling format 25, the card and Liquid's tool-use page document tools passed through tools= in apply_chat_template, calls returned as XML and results sent back as tool messages. Trained tool calling 20, the template loops over every entry in an assistant turn's tool_calls, so several calls fit in one turn, and the card says the model was trained on tool calls and agentic traces and with reinforcement learning inside agent harnesses. Structured output 15, Liquid's API guide documents response_format with a JSON Schema, with lfm3-1.7b as the model in its examples, and says the schema is checked before generation starts. Reasoning control 10, the card documents enable_thinking=False in the chat template to turn reasoning off per request, with reasoning on by default inside think tags, and preserve_thinking for earlier turns. Context 10, 256K tokens per the card, which says the mid-training stage extended the context window to 256K, and max_position_embeddings 262144 in config.json. 20 + 25 + 20 + 15 + 10 + 10 = 100.

WeVisOne-VL-4B 70

Chat template 20, chat_template.jinja in the repository (5,292 characters), Qwen3-VL's template. Tool-calling format 25, Read for a perception model as what it takes and returns. Trained tool calling 10, Read for a perception model as the inputs it was trained to use. Structured output 15, Read for a perception model as typed outputs. Reasoning control 0, the card says it writes structured output directly with no chain-of-thought reasoning. Context 0, Tencent states no context length for it. 20 + 25 + 10 + 15 + 0 + 0 = 70.

Documentation and upkeep LFM3-1.7B +19

LFM3-1.7B 67

Model card 17, Intended use (local agents, tool calling, structured outputs, fine-tuning), a limitation (not recommended for agentic coding or complex multi-step reasoning), architecture (24 layers: 13 gated short convolutions, 5 sliding-window and 6 global attention), parameters (1.73B), context (256K) and 16 languages. Training data 5, A general description: 22T tokens of pre-training in two stages with the kinds of data added since LFM2, 1.75T tokens of supervised fine-tuning, then mixed reinforcement learning, distillation from six specialist teachers and agentic reinforcement learning. Last change 20, the last commit, on 9 November 2026, added the OpenVINO checkpoint to the card's inference table, a day before this check. Responsiveness 10, Of the 22 discussions that aren't pull requests (27 October to 8 November 2026), 7 have a reply from a LiquidAI member, which is some. Version policy 5, LFM3 came out in new repositories and the LFM2.5 models stay in theirs. File health 10, Config, template and card agree on the lfm3 architecture, the 262,144-token context and the thinking switch. 17 + 5 + 20 + 10 + 5 + 10 = 67.

WeVisOne-VL-4B 48

Model card 8, Intended use, limitations and the architecture are on the card. Training data 5, A general description in the README of a data engine and over 100 million annotated images, with no sources named and no cut-off. Last change 20, the last commit, on 27 October 2026, added links to the paper and project page, 14 days before this check. Responsiveness 0, Neither of the 2 discussions that aren't pull requests (23 and 26 October 2026) has a reply from a tencent member, counted on 10 November by author flags and dates with a script, text not read. Version policy 5, A first release, 14 days old. File health 10, Config, template and card agree on the Qwen3-VL classes, and the card names mask_decoder.pt as required and it's there. 8 + 5 + 20 + 0 + 5 + 10 = 48.

Reach LFM3-1.7B +15

LFM3-1.7B 85

Memory 30, Liquid's Q4_K_M GGUF is 1.10 GB, and 1.10 GB × 1.2 = 1.3 GB, which fits 8 GB, well inside the 16 GB line. Runtimes 15, Released llama.cpp has the lfm3 architecture (src/models/lfm3.cpp at b12242), Ollama's library has an lfm3 entry, and LM Studio's catalogue runs the architecture (its liquid/lfm3-vl-2b entry; lmstudio-community publishes a GGUF of this model). Builds 15, Liquid's GGUF repository holds Q4_0, Q4_K_M, Q8_0, F16 and BF16 files, and Liquid publishes 4-bit and 8-bit MLX builds and an ONNX repository, all in the LiquidAI organisation. Terms 10, the LFM Open License v1.0, a custom licence that lets anyone use it commercially for free below a threshold of $10M annual revenue. Download 10, the Hub API reports gated false for the model and its GGUF, MLX and ONNX repositories on 10 November 2026, so the files download with no account and nothing to accept. Hosted 5, Liquid's own API lists lfm3-1.7b among its models, so the publisher hosts it. 30 + 15 + 15 + 10 + 10 + 5 = 85.

WeVisOne-VL-4B 70

Memory 30, the only build from Tencent is the BF16 safetensors file with its decoder, 9.7 GB, and 9.7 GB × 1.2 = 11.6 GB, within 16 GB. No runtime library has a build. Runtimes 15, the architecture is Qwen3VLForConditionalGeneration, which vLLM 0.33.0, SGLang 0.5.23 and Transformers 5.22.2 run from the safetensors file, three at 5 each. Builds 0, Tencent publishes the BF16 weights only. Terms 15, Apache 2.0 in the card's metadata with the LICENSE file in the repository, and nothing added. Download 10, the Hub API reports gated false on 10 November 2026, so the files download with no account and nothing to accept. Hosted 0, Hugging Face maps no inference provider to it. 30 + 15 + 0 + 15 + 10 + 0 = 70.

Risk WeVisOne-VL-4B +15

LFM3-1.7B 40

File safety 15, safetensors only, no .bin, .pt or .pth files (25). Provenance 15, files in the LiquidAI organisation, which Liquid's docs page for the model and its blog post link to (10). Safety evaluation 0, no safety results on the card or in Liquid's blog post for the LFM3 family, neither of which mentions safety testing. Agent guidance 0, Nothing on prompt injection, an instruction hierarchy, what refusals cover or safeguards to add. Licence risk 10, 15 less 5 for the $10M annual revenue threshold on commercial use. Security programme 0, no way to report a flaw found. 15 + 15 + 0 + 0 + 10 + 0 = 40.

WeVisOne-VL-4B 55

File safety 15, the backbone is safetensors, but mask_decoder.pt, a PyTorch pickle the card calls a required component, sits beside it. Provenance 15, the files sit in the tencent organisation, which Tencent's GitHub repository for the model links to (10), and the Hub gives a SHA-256 for the large files (5). Safety evaluation 0, no safety results on the card or in the README. Agent guidance 5, General cautions: the card says the release is for research, isn't for autonomous high-impact decisions or identifying individuals, and lists where masks go wrong. Licence risk 15, Apache 2.0 with no use policy, no threshold and no right to change the terms. Security programme 5, Tencent's Security Response Center takes vulnerability reports company-wide, as the Hy3 listing records (5). 15 + 15 + 0 + 5 + 15 + 5 = 55.

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runLFM3-1.7BWeVisOne-VL-4BEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%258570LFM3-1.7B +15
Risk20%204055WeVisOne-VL-4B +15
Agent interface10%1010070LFM3-1.7B +30
Documentation and upkeep10%106748LFM3-1.7B +19
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 61/100C 61/100

Facts side by side

FactLFM3-1.7BWeVisOne-VL-4B
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorLiquid AITencent (WeChat Vision)
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceLFM Open License v1.0 (free commercial use below $10M annual revenue)Apache-2.0
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtyesno
Last release2026-11-092026-10-27
Terms last updatedno document linkednot read yet
Privacy policy last updatedno document linkedno document linked

Verdicts

LFM3-1.7B

A 1.73B model that fits an 8 GB machine with room to spare, with a documented tool-call format, deferred tools, a thinking switch and a 256K context. It runs today in llama.cpp, Ollama and LM Studio only, loads in Transformers through repository code, and has no safety results, security contact or data sources.

WeVisOne-VL-4B

A small Apache 2.0 perception model that finds, counts, reads and cuts out what you name in an image, and says None when it isn't there. Boxes and points run in vLLM, SGLang or Transformers. Masks and mattes need Tencent's package and a pickle file. Two weeks old, with no questions answered yet and no safety results.

Before you call either

LFM3-1.7B

  1. Start it with llama-server -hf LiquidAI/LFM3-1.7B-GGUF:Q4_K_M --jinja or ollama run lfm3
  2. Use temperature 0.1, top_k 50 and repetition penalty 1.1 for chat, tools and agents, per the card
  3. Pass enable_thinking=False for direct answers, and expect it to reason anyway on hard tasks
  4. For a large tool catalogue mark tools defer_loading and give it a search tool
  5. Don't plan on vLLM or SGLang until a release carries LFM3
  6. Liquid doesn't recommend it for agentic coding or complex multi-step reasoning

WeVisOne-VL-4B

  1. Use Tencent's package: WeVisOneVL("tencent/WeVisOne-VL-4B", backend="vllm") then model.predict(image, task=..., query=...)
  2. Tasks are detection, referring, point, count_box, count_point, ocr, ocr_grounding, segmentation and matting
  3. A None answer means the target isn't in the image. Treat it as a result, not an error
  4. mask_decoder.pt is a pickle. Load it only from the tencent repository, and check its SHA-256 against the Hub's
  5. Send one image a turn. Video grids are rejected by the decoder
  6. The card says it isn't for identifying individuals or for high-impact decisions on its own

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, LFM3-1.7B or WeVisOne-VL-4B?

LFM3-1.7B and WeVisOne-VL-4B score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 61 (C) and 61 (C). WeVisOne-VL-4B leads on risk.

Other comparisons with LFM3-1.7B or WeVisOne-VL-4B

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